One of the advantages of writing about your own workshop is that you can benefit from participant evaluations. Over seventy-five people attended the full-day workshop on Instructional Design that I led last October,[1] and at least twenty seven of those in attendance had never before enrolled in a NERCOMP event. Over twenty five of these people drove more than five hours roundtrip to participate. This leads me to believe that many people feel a compelling need to understand and benefit from instructional design, so much so that people will step out of their comfort zones and venture, literally, into new territories.

Yet, these numbers aside, one comment in the written feedback was particularly striking to me: "There wasn't a conversation on why good instructional design is necessary." How telling and how ironic! While many educators, particularly those involved in online learning, may feel a pressing need to understand the ins and outs of instructional design, they're still not quite sure what it is--or even if it's necessary! I must confess that, at times, I even count myself among that crowd.

Why Good Instructional Design Is Necessary

The following anecdote provides the best argument I have heard yet in support of instructional design. It comes from a presentation I attended given by Jean Runyon at the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning in November 2007.[2]

For a number of years, Jean has co-taught Information Age: "Emerging Technologies," a fully online, large enrollment (100+ student) course through the College of Southern Maryland. After receiving training in the Quality Matters (QM) approach to course improvement,[3] Jean used QM's rubric to revise the course’s design. For example, she added a learning guide (explicit roadmap), reorganized the course materials by grouping session content and activities into “modules,” and added classroom assessment techniques (CATs) to each module.[4]

Neither Jean nor co-teacher Tom Gorecki changed who they were as teachers. In fact, they already had been recognized as very good instructors. In 2004 Jean received the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) Northeast Faculty Member Award for excellence in teaching. The only thing that changed was the instructional design of the course. What a perfect opportunity to ascertain the impact of course design on student learning!

A comparison of pre- and post-revision student performance was both enlightening and gratifying. In reviewing the learning management system logs, Runyon found that student interaction with course content increased significantly in the revised course, indicating improved accessibility and student engagement. Retention rates in the redesigned course now often exceed that for a face-to-face version of the course. Finally, and most compelling, Runyon discovered that grades improved after the online course's redesign, with more As, fewer Fs, and almost a ¾ letter final grade improvement across the board.[5] Not only does quality matter, Runyon's research clearly indicates that instructional design matters.

Highlights from the Instructional Design SIG Event

The SIG workshop activities were based on an online course that I co-developed for Simmons College.[6] The course, "Learning about Learning Online," received the 2006 Exemplary Course Award. [7] I must admit it felt a bit odd, transforming an online course into a face-to-face workshop--usually the flow goes in the opposite direction.

Significant Learning

Prior to the workshop, we sent out an email message asking participants to think about the following questions: what is a topic for a course that you might teach online? If you work in a support capacity, identify a topic that you might collaborate with faculty to develop. With this course in mind, jot down notes in response to the following three questions:

• What do you want your students to know? (facts)
• What do you want them to be able to do? (skills)
• What do you want them to be able to understand? (how will they change/grow)

Participant responses included the following examples:

• Learning to ride a motorcycle
• Learning to speak Spanish
• Learning about Shaker apothecary through doing
• Learning to ski
• Learning Frontpage software (by necessity & without directions)
• Learning to operate an eighteen-wheeler truck

The face-to-face format afforded us the opportunity to begin with a typical course icebreaker, then to look at how that same activity could be designed for use in an online course icebreaker. I asked participants to reflect on their most memorable significant learning experiences, to create a list, and then to select one specific example that they would be willing to share with a neighbor.

After sharing stories with a neighbor, the pairs analyzed their stories, looking for similarities and differences. As a table of four to six people, they used newsprint to map thematic patterns. When we debriefed as a whole group together, we realized that most examples took place outside of a classroom and often had nothing to do with formal education. Many examples involved physical interaction as well as a sense of belonging to a community.

We then compared our firsthand findings with the following eight-part taxonomy articulated in Dee Fink's seminal work, Significant Learning:[8]

Diagram Source: http://www.ou.edu/pii/significant/WHAT%20IS.pdf

As the group compared their experiences with Fink's diagram, they noticed another pattern. Formal teaching usually focuses on foundational knowledge and application, with perhaps a touch of integration. But the predominant themes in our stories of significant learning centered on the human dimension, caring, inquiry, and finding motivation for self-directed learning.

As we headed out for a short break, we considered the implications of this exercise for instructional design. How can we develop substantive learning experiences that address all eight dimensions of significant” learning?

Turning Our Attention Online

What might the "significant learning" exercise look like online? How would it differ from the activity we had just experienced? As I walked them through the online version, the most notable differences were the:

While this may seem like overkill, in my experience it is necessary. Online learning is literally a different mode of learning, one that has its own set of affordances and constraints. I asked the workshop participants to consider how much time it would take to read every word that had been uttered by a workshop participant in the previous hour. If captured in text, these spoken words would add up to a hundred or more pages in print. Hence the request for concise posts in the online version of the assignment!

We also considered the opportunities afforded by the text-heavy realm of online learning. Instead of fleeting words soon forgotten, class “participation” is textual data that both students and faculty can mine for analysis. By way of example, I showed a chart that one of my students developed, unsolicited, as she tried to reconcile her peers’ stories of significant learning with Fink's taxonomy:

Online Student's Analysis of Common Elements
in Stories of Significant Learning

Story Author	Learning to learn	Caring	Human Dimension	Foundation Knowledge	Application	Integration
GG		X		X	X	X
CL	X	X	X
ST	X	X	X
BR		X	X		X
JH		X		X	X
NS		X		X	X	X
DZ		X	X	X
Chart reproduced with the permission of Diane Zydlewski, Instructional Design student, 2007. Initials inserted in lieu of student names to protect privacy

Using student posts as data, Zydlewski was able to identify "caring" as a pervasive characteristic, an insight that challenged assumptions, sparked a lively discussion, and became a theme we revisited during subsequent weeks in the class. This would have been difficult, if not impossible, in a face-to-face class.

Planning a Learning Sequence

In the last session before lunch, we revisited the pre-workshop questions in preparation for planning a learning sequence:

When developing a course or a unit of learning, it’s tempting to start with either lectures (what can I tell them?) or activities (what can I have them do to fill classtime?). Education specialists, notably Grant Wiggins, argue that neither of these approaches are likely to result in significant learning. Lecture-heavy courses provide few mechanisms for students to forge memorable connections between the subject matter and firsthand experience, resulting in poor retention of learning. Activity-centric courses may be lively and popular, but may not result in the desired learning outcomes. This is because discrete activities that aren’t woven into a substantive, extended learning sequence make it difficult for students to forge intellectual connections between their experiences and the subject matter’s essential concepts. This is equivalent to a highly memorable advertisement jingle ("Where’s the beef?") whose product and purpose is ultimately forgotten (fast food? political stump speech?).

Wiggins and others stress the importance of beginning with goals for student learning, then considering the experiences that would yield evidence of student progress toward those learning outcomes. This is often referred to as "backwards design."[9] In the online learning context, I find that course designers need to be particularly attentive to the evidence of learning that students will generate as part of the learning sequence. If you're in a face-to-face class and students aren’t "getting it," good teachers can usually sense a general air of confusion or a lapse in student engagement. But in an online course, student work is the sole source of evidence. For example, you may have created the best voice-over PowerPoints in the world, but how do you know if your students were even looking at the computer as these files were playing?

Once you have identified the goals for learning and the types of evidence that will help you and your students assess progress toward meeting those goals, the next step is to design an integrated learning sequence that would generate the desired evidence. In many ways, it's a process of reverse engineering a learning journey (or, to address a range of learning styles, designing a network of possible paths that would result in similar learning outcomes).

As workshop participants dispersed for lunch, we distributed the following planning template that was designed to guide them through the process of planning a learning sequence:

The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to formulating, fleshing out, and providing peer feedback on participants' learning sequences.

SIG Participant Observations Regarding Learning Sequences:

"The learning sequence I reviewed allows people to find their own way to the outcomes--but is still driven by the goals"

"Highly structured online learning sequences have a tendency to be linear. If you decide to provide multiple paths to achieve non-linear learning, provide a road map so that students don’t get lost."

"You may want to allow students to submit their assignment in a variety of formats. Assignment rubrics are important, because they provide a means for assessing work quality across a range of formats."

Concluding Thoughts

When it comes to online learning, it can be tempting to focus on the technology--to use all the "bells and whistles" afforded by learning management systems and Web 2.0 technologies. But the best, most thoughtful, and ultimately most meaningful online learning is preceded by offline "backwards" design. In addition, a carefully constructed learning sequence can also serve as a "spec" for the functionality that is needed to accomplish your goals, making it more likely that you will select the most appropriate technical tool for the job.

Even as online learning attains its due respect and ubiquity in higher education, we still have much to learn. In the end, the novelty of computer-mediated learning only serves to focus our attention on things that we regularly overlook, and even take for granted, in face-to-face contexts: how people learn, what's most important for our students to learn, and the ultimate goal of achieving significant learning.

Notes

1. Gail Matthews-DeNatale and Jason Gorman, "Instructional Design for Online Learning" (NERCOMP SIG Event, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, October 29, 2007),  http://nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=1225 . [back to text]
    
   
2. Runyon, Jean “Quality in Design: Impact on Student Achievement,” (talk, Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, November 2007), http://www.ce.ucf.edu/asp/aln . [back to text]
    
   
3. MarylandOnline, Inc., "Quality Matters: Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning," http://www.qualitymatters.org . [back to text]
    
   
4. National Teaching and Learning Forum, "Angelo and Cross CATs (Classroom Assessment Techniques)," http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/assess.htm ; Teaching Effectiveness Program, "50 CATS by Angelo and Cross," (University of Oregon), http://tep.uoregon.edu/resources/newteach/fifty_cats.pdf . [back to text]
    
   
5. The Sloan-C Wiki, "College of Southern Maryland; Quality in Course Design & Impact on Student Achievement," http://www.sloan-c-wiki.org/wiki/index.php . [back to text]
    
   
6. SIG Event Handout Booklet (Durham, NH, October 29, 2007),
   http://nercomp.org/data/media/GailHandout102907.pdf . [back to text]
    
   
7. Blackboard, Inc., "2006 Exemplary Course Award Recipients,"
   http://www.webct.com/exemplary/viewpage?name=exemplary_home_page#2006 . [back to text]
    
   
8. Fink, L. Dee, "What is Significant Learning?" (Significant Learning website, University of Oklahoma),
   http://www.ou.edu/pii/significant/WHAT%20IS.pdf . [back to text]
    
   
9. Wiggins, Grant, "What is Understanding By Design?" (Authentic Education, Hopewell, NJ), http://www.grantwiggins.org/ubd.html . [back to text]
    
   

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